It's funny. The first Linux distribution I ever used, way back in '05 on a terrible P2 laptop with 128Mb of RAM, was DamnSmallLinux. It ran in RAM from what I can recall, at least off my USB drive (the disk iso dd'ed to it) with a floppy as the bootloader to hit the USB :)
Those were the days. I also remember getting Slax to boot from the HDD, which it was never designed to do. Nostalgia...
There were also 1.4M floppies with barebone Linux that booted and ran completely in 8M of RAM on a 386. You could remove the floppy after it booted and continue using Linux.
Those were the days. I also remember getting Slax to boot from the HDD, which it was never designed to do. Nostalgia...